Large Number Coincidences and the Anthropic Principle in Cosmology

Abstract

Prof. Wheeler has asked me to say something for the record about some ideas that I once suggested (at the Clifford Memorial meeting in Princeton in 1970) and to which Hawking and Collins have referred (Astrophys. J.180, 317, 1973). This concerns a line of thought which I believe to be potentially fertile, but which I did not write up at the time because I felt (as I still feel) that it needs further development. However, it is not inappropriate that this matter should have cropped up again on the present occasion, since it consists basically of a reaction against exaggerated subservience to the ‘Copernican principle’.